What started as a reasoned debate on funding turned, halfway through the 1890s, into something more conspiratorial.

Some reputations – notably those of Alois Führer, Vincent Smith, and Rhys Davids – need radical revision. Yet let us strive to look on the bright side. The Royal Asiatic Society (RAS) Council proved capable of purging one, at least, of the wrong-doers, and of preventing any more archaeological lies being disseminated in its name.

The wild story of how the British Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) actually went down.

It is often overlooked that in Buddhism fact is interwoven with value, while in science they are still further apart. This makes the claims about the compatibility of the two systems somewhat naive, and explains why recently the “dialogue” takes the form of neuroscientific research of meditation: work that hardly changes or challenges the foundations of science.

This article presents an overview of what Buddhism is contributing to neuroscience and a word on what Buddhism might further contribute.

The discourse concerning Buddhist modernism has carried with it a subtle claim that so-called “modern” Buddhists are not really “Buddhists” at all; they are tainted by Western culture, philosophy, and religion, and as such are peripheral to the study of the “authentic Buddhism” that resides in a more “traditional” Asia.

… Buddhists of all stripes, are reduced to stereotypes of “traditional” and “modern” that fail to capture the multifaceted nature of their religious traditions, beliefs, and practices […] condemning those who fail to live up to the standard of a non-Westernized “traditional” Buddhism that [Western scholars themselves] created as a mirror to the modern West.

This article presents a powerful response to Western scholars like Donald Lopez Jr. who dismiss modern Buddhists, explaining how “Buddhist Studies continues at times to employ Orientalizing strategies even as it seeks to distance itself from” claims of Orientalism.

We provide our audience, in fact, with a variety of mirrors. This is the service of scholarship.

No one among us can predict, much less legislate, the future of appropriate or meaningful language—to do so would be to claim individual property rights over something that is useful and valuable only because it cannot be owned by individuals. Like the single true text, the single appropriate expression is only a fiction, a fantasy created by our desire to control the authority of the sacred word.

We would be well advised, therefore, to open the field to alternative models, but to do so with constant watchfulness. There is no single alternative method that will solve our problems.

More common among contemporary scholars is the role of the anti-priest: the guardian of “secular authority.” I do not refer here to the common iconoclasm directed at the consecrated work of other scholars, rather, I refer to the scholar’s interest in undermining the authority of the tradition he or she studies. Seldom is this role part of the scholars public role. The motives remain a mystery to me, but it is clear that it is polite to pretend that scholarship is perfectly neutral. We would advance considerably if we stopped once and for all the pretense that our scholarship is never inimical to Buddhist belief and practice.

On the one hand, the scholar denies his roles as literary creator and craftsman, on the other hand he or she claims to be “original.” On the one hand, the scholar elevates his role to that of the primary creator (devaluating the standpoint of the voices he is claiming to report), on the other, he or she skirts the responsibilities that come with usurping the primary voice.

Humanistic scholarship stands in a no-man’s land between tradition and criticism, between community and individual preferences. It cannot seek and cannot lead to agreement. The greatest mistake we can make is to try to be the fabled “last man” who has “the last word”. Our role vis a vis community is not one of deciding the issues once and for all but one of keeping more than one voice alive.

Buddhists scholar-practitioners have two major responsibilities vis-à-vis our students: 1) encourage students to “sympathetically understand” the tradition and 2) develop some critical perspective on a tradition with its lengthy history, multiplicity of sectarian forms, and great diversity of ways in which the religion has had and continues to have impact on culture, art, politics, and so forth.

It is possible that Hilditch asked Chinese residents in Manchester to assist him with the services but had been rejected, but their omission is more likely down to the fact he wanted to cement his status as the authority of the temple. By donning Chinese robes, Hilditch added a heightened sense of reality to the display than would have been created if he had worn English clothes, while simultaneously increasing his supposed authority; he played both museum guide and Buddhist Priest.

Hilditch’s understanding of China seems to parallel that of the Protestant missionaries who saw Buddhist rituals as ‘a kind of absurd theatre, in which a nation of actors engaged in stylized fictions full of sounds and fury but signifying nothing’ Given Hilditch’s slippery relationship with the truth, it is difficult to discern whether even he believed in his temple’s accuracy. However, his sense of entitlement to construct the temple and claim its authenticity does suggest that he had interiorized the British sense of authority over Chinese culture.

…all claims for the compatibility of Buddhism and science are nonsense…

Lopez correctly points out that many of the elements of modern Buddhism trace back to debates with European colonizers, whose logic the Buddhists then partially adopted. He then claims that this adoption of foreign elements by Buddhists represents not an evolution but a “degeneration” of the tradition:

It is clear that the Buddhism that is compatible with science must jettison much of what Buddhism has been in order to claim that compatibility. That loss evokes for me the classical Buddhist doctrine of the degeneration of the dharma

Lopez thus presents Buddhism with a double bind: if the religion doesn’t adapt, it’s incompatible with science and modernity. But if it does, it’s degenerate and inauthentic.

In defining authenticity by privileging certain historical texts and their interpretation by Western scholars such as himself over the words and deeds of contemporary Buddhist leaders such as the Dalai Lama (whom he calls a “spokesperson”), Lopez risks perpetuating the same Colonial logic he so eloquently describes.

For a fuller post-colonial critique of this essentializing sentimentality (which we call “Orientalism”), see “Western Self, Asian Other” by Natalie Quli.

The first part of the paper examines the role of the Buddhist canon in research and in teaching, the trend towards non-canonical sources, and the current affection for contemporary practice. As a textual scholar who works with canonical texts, I intend to point to some risks that are, in my view, inherent in that general trend.

Lamotte’s argument led to various debates that gave rise to a wide array of hypotheses on who the author of Dà Zhìdù Lùn could have been. The theory that Dà Zhìdù Lùn could have been a text not (or not only) written by Nāgārjuna reached Chinese Buddhist monks and scholars as well, including the monk Yìnshùn (1906-2005). This paper will show the impact of Western scholarship on East Asian Buddhism, highlight the (pluri)directionality of knowledge.

For many scholars who found themselves disenchanted with the romantisized and/or rationalized versions of Buddhism that once dominated the field, the discovery of relic and image worship was the smoking gun that provided irrefutable evidence that Buddhists are not bourgeois rationalists after all. The worship of relics exemplified the newfound otherness of Buddhism, for it would seem to involve the sanctification of that which is utterly profane and loathsome—the corporeal remains of the dead.

The allure of Buddhist relics is not limited to the faithful but extends also to Western academics with their own beliefs to demonstrate.

The paper argues for the suitability, or at least acceptability, of a translation style which I call jolie laide, i.e. a rendering which is not necessarily exquisite in its aesthetic quality but is as faithful as possible to the original and perfectly intelligible in the target language. This is not a mechanical process, and in order to meet these standards, the translator should allow for flexibility and make full use of the critical apparatus. I do not rule out, however, other rendering strategies, and the last part of my contribution illustrates the possibility of having jolies laides side by side with free translations. The article also contains an appendix on Dao’an’s‘five [points of permissible] deviation from the original and three [points which should remain] unchanged’ and Xuanzang’s‘five types [of Indic words which should] not be translated’.

As a primary focus, “Historical” appeared in every answer, but in only three cases was it listed as the sole focus (10%). It was found in combination most often with “Textual” (61%) and “Anthropological” (42%). “Contemporary” appeared only eleven times (36%) and “linguistic” seven (23%).

The results of a small, online survey of Anglophone Buddhist Studies departments.

Insider input through home nurture, teaching materials, teacher expertise, insider input and pedagogy had already been applied to good effect in the classroom. However, in the areas of the Agreed Syllabuses for Religious Education, school ethos and national representation input was found lacking or skewed toward ‘convert’ Buddhist expectations, while the voice of the more numerous ‘migrant’ Buddhist community remained relatively unheard.

One could, of course, dismiss this as a misunderstanding of what real Buddhism is, but then one would probably have to jettison most of the history of Buddhism in Japan as wrongheaded delusion as well. The cost is considerable.

The piece is organized into three sections, in which I comment on misrepresentations of what I have tried to do; on “silences” in the history of morality, or, alternately, on what constitutes evidence in studies of that history; and on gender-specificity as it relates to these questions.

the present article discusses the difficulties of defining mindfulness, delineates the proper scope of research into mindfulness practices, and explicates crucial methodological issues for interpreting results from investigations of mindfulness.

For doing so, the authors draw on their diverse areas of expertise to review the present state of mindfulness research, comprehensively summarizing what we do and do not know, while providing a prescriptive agenda for contemplative science, with a particular focus on assessment, mindfulness training, possible adverse effects, and intersection with brain imaging.

A manifesto of sorts for the major current trend in Western mindfulness research which accepts the therapeutic potential of meditation and now seaks to understand it on medicine’s terms: dose, side-effects, and mechanism of action.

In the cases of Ven. Hạt and Ven. Thuần Tịnh, they certainly meet the criteria above. They have seemingly achieved [feminist scholar Rita] Gross’ agenda for androgynous Buddhism without openly adopting a feminist identity.

Holmes Welch (1921–1981) is a towering figure in the study of Buddhism whose [1960s] trilogy on modern Chinese Buddhism stood as the definitive work on the topic for decades and remains a touchstone today. In many ways, Welch appears ahead of its time. Yet an investigation of Welch’s papers makes clear that his work can only be fully understood in the context of the Cold War, for it was not only shaped by but also served the American struggle against Communism.

This article explores how Buddhist Studies as a discipline serves the objectives of Western empires through the case study of one particular mid-century scholar.

The article begins by reviewing the literature on museums and the sacred. It discusses the lack of concern historically for religion in museums, noting how sacred objects have tended to be ‘secularized’ in exhibitionary contexts. It then examines the Buddhism display at the World Museum Liverpool, part of the permanent World Cultures gallery which opened in 2005, with its reconstructions of a shrine, an altar and a protective chapel — this is a museological environment which deliberately evokes the atmosphere of a temple.

Whatever happened to “Engaged Buddhism”? Twenty years after a flurry of publication placing this global movement firmly on the map, enthusiasm for the term itself appears to have evaporated. I attempt to reconstruct what happened: scholars turned away from the concept for its reproducing colonialist understandings of traditional Buddhism as essentially world-rejecting, and they developed alternate discourses for describing Buddhist actors’ multifarious social and political engagements, especially in contemporary Asia.

I describe the specific rise and fall of the term in Anglophone scholarship, in order for scholars to better grasp the evolution of contemporary Western, Anglophone Buddhisms, to better understand what Buddhists in Asia are in fact doing with the term, and to better think through what it might mean politically for us as scholars to deploy the term at all. In particular, I identify “Academic Engaged Buddhism” (1988–2009) as one hegemonic form of Engaged Buddhism, a Western Buddhist practitioner-facing anthological project of Euro-American scholars with potentially powerful but unevenly distributed effects on Buddhist thought and practice around the world.

Some academic scholars of Buddhism, who also practice Buddhism, are exploring new ways to serve both the critical interests of the modern academy and the constructive needs of their Buddhist communities…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a Mahayana Buddhist teaching- and group-based intervention, the Awareness Training Program (ATP), which is textually aligned to a Mahayana Sūtra so that its theory and practice are coherent. The ATP aims to alleviate stress by enhancing participant’s compassion and wisdom of nonattachment. Middle-aged working adults (n = 122) in Hong Kong participated in this randomized waiting-list controlled trial. Self-reported psychological questionnaires were used to assess the participants’ level of stress (PSS), sense of coherence (SOC), psychological well-being (GHQ), and nonattachment (NAS) at pretest, posttest, and 3 months later. The data showed significant improvements in the intervention group over the controls for all outcome measures at posttest and 3 months later. A mediation analysis demonstrated that nonattachment mediated both the treatment and the maintenance effects for all outcome variables.

While mindfulness meditation improves pain and depression symptoms and quality of life, additional well-designed, rigorous, and large-scale RCTs are needed to decisively provide estimates of [its] efficacy

Despite heterogeneity of outcomes across studies, there is evidence that brief MBIs can impact numerous health-related outcomes after only one session and with interventions as brief as 5 min.

This meta-analysis of 85 meditation interventions shows that even a small amount of meditation is beneficial.

Collectively, the 12 eligible studies suggest that incorporating the Buddhist wisdom practices of contemplating interdependence, emptiness, and perspective-taking on self and others may enhance prosocial behaviour through various mechanisms, such as (i) developing a sense of interdependence and common humanity, (ii) fostering the altruistic desire to help others, and (iii) experiencing a state of oneness. However, concerns were raised about the overuse and reliability of self-report measures for accurately assessing prosocial behaviour

The most frequently co-occurring keywords were meditation, depression, stress, and anxiety. Co-citation analysis of the early period (1966–2015) revealed how scholarly work on spiritual themes inspired early mindfulness research. Recent trends (2016–2021) revealed a rising interest in mechanisms and moderators, long-term meditators, neuroscientific studies, and smartphone/online delivery of interventions.

the significance of the Japanese Buddhist cartography of Xuanzang’s Great Tang Record of the Western Regions for the origins of the academic study of Buddhism in Europe.

the Western tradition of virtue ethics and an introductory sketch of how it might provide a foundation for ecology in Buddhism

… the belief that all engagement is Western-influenced seems to endure, so Buddhists who avoid doctrinal hybridization may be assumed to not engage. These assumptions persist because relatively few studies are done on Buddhists’ and especially traditionalists’ actual engagement; some studies mischaracterize engaged traditionalists as modernists; and little research on today’s traditionalists, engaged or not, is done because scholars of contemporary Buddhism gravitate toward modernists.

The article was followed up in the same journal with a practical example of such an organization: The FPMT.

These, and other, statements of his have been reinterpreted in ways that I feel Nāgārjuna would find difficult to recognize as fitting into his Buddhist worldview.

On taking Nāgārjuna seriously as both a philosopher and as a Buddhist

The essay connects the field of Buddhist studies to a larger conversation in the field of global education, arguing that Buddhist studies travel courses must interrogate concepts of global citizenship, address the legacies of colonialism, and teach the principles of ethical travel, in addition to introducing students to the living traditions of global Buddhism.

A total of 315 participants (26%) reported having had particularly unpleasant meditation-related experiences, which they thought may have been caused by their meditation practice. Logistic regression models indicated that unpleasant meditation-related experiences were less likely to occur in female participants and religious participants. Participants with higher levels of repetitive negative thinking, those who only engaged in deconstructive types of meditation (e.g., vipassana), and those who had attended a meditation retreat were more likely to report unpleasant meditation-related experiences.

Underscoring the importance of engaging in meditation practices in a balanced way.

mindfulness is proposed to introduce flexibility in the generation of cognitive appraisals by enhancing interoceptive attention, thereby expanding the scope of cognition to facilitate reappraisal of adversity and savoring of positive experience. This process is proposed to culminate in a deepened capacity for meaning-making and greater engagement with life.

An attempt at explaining mindfulness through the lens of “positive thinking.”

Nagarjuna seems willing to embrace contradictions while at the same time making use of classic reductio arguments. He asserts that he rejects all philosophical views including his own-that he asserts nothing-and appears to mean it. It is argued here that he, like many philosophers in the West and, indeed, like many of his Buddhist colleagues, discovers and explores true contradictions arising at the limits of thought. For those who share a dialetheist’s comfort with the possibility of true contradictions commanding rational assent, for Nagarjuna to endorse such contradictions would not undermine but instead confirm the impression that he is indeed a highly rational thinker. It is argued that the contradictions he discovers are structurally analogous to many discovered by Western philosophers and mathematicians.

One of the early functions of the talisman was for a ruler to authorize the conduct and scope of authority of a general (e.g., how many troops he could command). The military context of talismans later found a corollary in the spiritual realm and permitted their possessor to summon and control a variety of deities that could be drawn on in battles with spirits.

When it came to such significant acts, such as warding off disease demons and protecting or extending one’s life, Buddhist and Daoists were occupied with the same types of concerns and employed a similar arsenal of powerful techniques that drew on the powers embedded in esoteric talismans.

While mindfulness is a growing field of research, divergent and conflated meanings are limiting deeper interdisciplinary research. Interventions designed in one practice context may not be useful in other contexts because meaning is not transferred between settings. This review clarifies the various research domains that study mindfulness and the conceptual and operational definitions in each domain.

The results from the scoping review show three shared domains in mindfulness classifications: short-term effects of mindfulness, long-term effects of mindfulness, and mindfulness practices. The results from the content mapping show four domains of mindfulness research: mental health, behavioural change, cognitive neuroscience, and ethical mindfulness. Operational definitions of mindfulness are not articulated clearly in these domains.

Scholars in the ethical mindfulness domain will need solid conceptual and operational definitions to support their research efforts.

Widely read as he was in Western philosophy, one of Nishida’s main concerns was to find possible points of contact between his own heritage and the philosophical background of the modern civilization that was taking shape in Japan during his lifetime.

A comparative analysis of Kitarō Nishida and Dōgen Kigen’s thoughts on space and time and how these concepts are presented throughout their life’s work. The article largely focuses on the thought of Nishida, a 20th-century Japanese philosopher. While it is known that Nishida was greatly influenced by Western philosophy, the author brings Nishida into dialogue with Dōgen, particularly his Being-Time, in an attempt to show that Nishida was firmly rooted in Asian thought.

For an important task of the Zen philosopher is to police the border between the factual and the non-factual, between the sayable and the non-sayable, between the contingent and the necessary. But this task cannot be reduced to just policing. The Zen master must somehow point the disciple to the realm of the non-sayable while at the same time keeping him or her firmly anchored in the sayable.

Looking at Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations, this article compares the philosopher’s analysis of language to that of Zen Buddhism, particularly “koan Zen.” The author begins by highlighting the seeming resemblance between Wittgenstein’s idea of only saying “what can be said” and Zen’s attempts to use words to point to what is beyond words. Much of the remaining article compares Wittenstein’s methodology with Zen’s usage of koans.

In healthy adults, we found that compassion training increased altruistic redistribution of funds to a victim encountered outside of the training context. Furthermore, increased altruistic behavior after compassion training was associated with altered activation in brain regions implicated in social cognition and emotion regulation, including the inferior parietal cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and in DLPFC connectivity with the nucleus accumbens.

These results suggest that compassion can be cultivated with training and that greater altruistic behavior may emerge

Is the aim to have right view, or go beyond views; or is right view about not being attached to any view?

If the sense of self is doxastically anchored, then it will be anchored in the sort of belief that is ascribed along an action-based rather than judgement-based avenue.

A Western-philosophical exploration of the different levels of the “self” delusion.

Contemporary Buddhist studies has been strongly affected by its origins in the Victorian era, when Western religious scholars sought to rationalize and historicize the study of religion. Modern Asian scholars, trained within the Western scholarly paradigm, share this prejudice. The result is a skewed understanding of Buddhism, emphasizing its philosophical and theoretical aspects at the expense of seemingly ‘irrational’ religious elements based on the direct experience of meditation practice.

This meaning, the author holds, might best be characterized as “lucid awareness.” He questions the common explanation of mindfulness as “bare attention,” pointing out problems that lurk behind both words in this expression.

You can also listen to Jonathan Nelson read the paper aloud on YouTube if you prefer.

Being unfamiliar with tantra, they cannot recognize that what they’re looking at has a tantric origin, and they may think of it as simply (unproblematically) part of whatever tradition they are looking at…

On how elements of Buddhist tantra circulated across Buddhist Asia.

Currently, mindfulness is most often assessed [by psychologists] with self-report questionnaires. Although additional work is required, mindfulness questionnaires have reasonable psychometric properties and are making important contributions …

Measurement of mindfulness as a multidimensional construct shows that present-moment awareness can be unhelpful unless accompanied by a nonjudgmental, nonreactive stance; moreover, nonjudgment and nonreactivity may be only weakly related to present-moment awareness in people with no meditation experience.

After reviewing 17,801 citations, we included 47 trials with 3,320 participants. Mindfulness meditation programs had moderate evidence to improve anxiety at 8 weeks; depression at 8 weeks and 3–6 months and pain, and low evidence to improve stress/distress and mental health-related quality of life.

A large (15-author!) review of the literature on meditation effects shows where meditation is effective and what kinds of evidence the Western academy likes to see.

Stronger study designs are needed to determine the effects of meditation programs in improving the positive dimensions of mental health and stress-related behavior.

While hell realms seem pretty distant from the serenely meditating monks and mindful contemplation that Buddhism is usually associated with in the Western imagination, Buddhism has some of the most elaborate hell realms in the history of religion.

So long as researchers are investigating “meditation” in the abstract, they will miss out on the process by focusing too much on the goals. They will assume that the “goal” is a particular state that can be attained and stabilized, and will fail to understand the various techniques that are required for getting there in the first place.

A comparison of the path of meditative attainment as presented by the fifth-century, Sri Lankan author Buddhaghosa and by the sixteenth-century, Tibetan author Dakpo Tashi Namgyal along with some reflections on what this might mean for contemporary, “scientific” research on meditative states of consciousness.

… a group randomly assigned to 5 days of meditation practice with the integrative body–mind training method shows significantly better attention and control of stress than a similarly chosen control group given relaxation training.

A randomized, controlled trial shows that even just a few days of meditation is effective beyond a simple calming effect.

Tuning in, meditatively, all these things can loosen up. And it’s the loosening that’s the main thing.

… in sketching out what the councils were, I hope to indicate how they might be fruitfully studied

The wonder is not that these intuitive translators were sometimes incorrect, but that they were correct so often.

This Qi-based worldview—where Qi is this energy matrix that sustains existence—seems to explain why Kim Iryeop is talking about “emptiness” as power that a person can wield: Emptiness is a kind of energy that the creative human being is able to use to manifest value.

… the effects of a brief mindfulness program for emotional regulation and levels of mindfulness on senior students in Brazil.

Information about Buddhism was scarce and vague at best in the West until the beginning of the nineteenth century. The first Orientalists studying Indian sources had to rely on Hindu texts written in Sanskrit which portrayed the Buddha as an avatra of the Hindu god Viṣṇu. The situation changed with the discovery of the Pāli texts from Sri Lanka through scholars like George Turnour and the decipherment of the Aśokan inscriptions through James Prinsep by which the historical dimension of the religion became evident. The final confirmation of the historicity of the Buddha and the religion founded by him was taken, however, from the records of Chinese Buddhist travellers (Faxian, Xuanzang, Yijing) who had visited the major sacred places of Buddhism in India and collected other information about the history of the religion. This paper will discuss the first Western translations of these travelogues and their reception in the scholarly discourse of the period and will suggest that the historical turn to which it led had a strong impact on the study and reception of Buddhism-in a way the start of Buddhist Studies as a discipline.

Japanese Buddhology today is highly specialized, placing great emphasis on intense textual studies.

How Chinese and Western scholastic approaches have informed the contemporary approach to Buddhist Studies in Japan.

This volume emerges from a symposium entitled ‘Inevitable Ends: Meditations on Impermanence’, held at Aarhus University in May 2019, and an accompanying exhibition at the Moesgaard Museum, ‘Museum of Impermanence: Stories from Nepal, Papua New Guinea and Tibet’ (on display from 9 February to 19 May 2019)

… a view of our sense of self as an emergent process of “I-making” that is constructed in relation to our environment and the body on which it depends

Tzu Chi was founded in a small town in eastern Taiwan in 1966 by a lady who has become known by the title and name Master Cheng Yen (b.1937).

… an ethical theory centered on the experience of an individual where perception and affect are the loci of moral development

… when the Japanese kept insisting that Buddhism was a specific religion that originated in north India, westerners were puzzled. There was no cult of Buddha in India, and northern India in particular was largely Muslim.

On the early modern encounters between Europeans and Japanese Buddhists and how they shaped each other’s understanding of Asia.

… the discontinuity [with premodern forms of Buddhism] that the modernists emphasize is just that, an emphasis—it is less an observation than it is an ideologically motivated construction

An important note about how and why Western scholarship is reshaping the Buddhism it claims to study.

The third, and most important, reason [Buddhism uses narratives to communicate its ethics] is that we are narratives ourselves.

A defense of Buddhism as Philosophy from the Western perspective.

There’s enough overlap to make conversation possible and enough difference to make that conversation worthwhile.

Philosopher Jay Garfield talks about getting into Buddhist philosophy from the Western, academic tradition, and introduces the classic book of Mahāyana ethics by Śāntideva.

The three major aspects of computer technology that most visibly have taken over older technologies are word processing, electronic communication, and the development of large scale archives of both text and visual materials. These in turn have led to many other changes that raise interesting questions about our professional life, including aspects of pedagogy, intellectual community, economics, ownership of our work and our texts, and, perhaps most importantly, the quality of our work.

… what we have is the product of centuries of careful copying, careless copying, knowledge, incompetence, inspired emendation and bungling. And none of that stopped with the beginning of Western scholarship.

The brahmins would indeed take umbrage at being closely associated with the officiant, because the very fact of his being there as an officiant means that he is doing a paid job and so lowers his status below theirs. [The brahmins, in contrast,] have no duties; they are gracing the occasion.

On (one of) the differences between a priest and a Buddhist monk.

To deal with social dukkha, habitual tendencies rooted in the Three Poisons have to be identified and redressed in the constitutive social, cultural, and political environments too. In other words, Buddhist social theory recognizes that the manifestations of the Three Poisons are as much a matter of institutionalized, normative knowledge-practices as they are private, personal tendencies.

… anything that offers success in our unjust society without trying to change it is not revolutionary—it just helps people cope.

… both works typify a style of writing in Buddhist Studies that seems to blur the line between religious writing and academic analysis

One does not obtain sīla, let alone the Dhamma, from the historical process.

… how to interpret Buddhist Sanskrit texts in such a way as to avoid unnecessary bastardization of the English language, while still performing the scholarly task of making available the meaning of such texts to the scholarly community

… hypnotic response and meditation involve opposite processes

Meditation plunges us into the depths of the (normally) subconscious processes of intentions forming and contending in the mind. As we become more familiar with these processes, we can more quickly and accurately identify when, how and why the mind moves: pushing back the curtain of ignorance on the workings of our subconscious mind and reducing our tendency to be hypnotized and controlled.

And for a more recent study confirming the result, see “The association between mindfulness and hypnotizability” American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis. 2018 Jul; 61(1):4–17. doi: 10.1080/00029157.2017.1419458

I do recommend actually reading this paper. It has a good summary of other research done on meditation and a rather thoughtful analysis section. It’s less dense and jargon-heavy than other papers I’ve reviewed and gives a good window into the state of scientific research on Buddhist meditation circa 2012.

Buddhist ethics corresponds to a more generic, act-centered virtue ethics.

Notice especially how the Westerner philosophers tie themselves into knots trying to classify Buddhist Ethics according to their inferior theories and dogmatic rejection of karma.

Helpful for avoiding cults, for reassuring Westerners that Buddhist religious authority isn’t regressive, and a fascinating example of the West grappling with unfamiliar forms of spiritual education.